


The Five Year Gap

by ice_hot_13



Category: Top Gun (1986)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-09-30 12:02:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20446853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ice_hot_13/pseuds/ice_hot_13
Summary: The five-year gap in Pete's career is because of Ice.





	The Five Year Gap

**Author's Note:**

> so i read that article that said "hey maybe maverick isn't a captain because he disappeared for five years" and well, what was he doing for five years??? and here we are.

It wasn’t supposed to take five years. It wasn’t supposed to take _any _time; Pete was going to get the phone number, call, and put it all to bed. He didn’t expect Ice to be right where Pete had left him, exactly, but… somewhere retrievable.

First, he contacted Hollywood, who put him in touch with Slider, who was deployed and took several weeks to get back to Pete. When he did, it was to tell Pete that Ice had left the navy and no, Slider didn’t really know where he’d ended up.

From there, Pete had exhausted every favor he’d ever collected. It took the friend of a friend of his dad’s to tell him about Ice’s last RIO, and when Pete contacted _him, _the guy said only that Ice had mentioned, of all goddamn things, moving to Canada.

The first thing Pete wanted to do, he decided, was to ask Ice _why the hell _he would move to Canada, of all places. Second – second, Pete would have worked out something to say to explain everything he’d felt, and by the time he found Ice, he would have formulated the perfect thing. Hopefully by then, he would also know what he even wanted to come of it.

Far too late, Pete had realized: he was in love with Ice. It had been six years, which should have been long enough to move on, but Ice – he’d spent those six years responding to Pete’s stupid postcards.

The first one had been a joke. A touristy postcard from London, and Pete had written _Greetings from Paris! _on the back. Ice had sent back a postcard from a beach and written _in Alaska, very cold. _It was stupid, but it had gone on for a year before Ice sent him an actual sealed-in-an-envelope letter on the anniversary of Goose’s death, which read _everyone really did like him, you know. What I meant was that he was an uplifting presence, and you guys had the kind of friendship that made other people feel happy to see it, like it reminded us that good people are out there. _

From there, the letters were more familiar, although Pete occasionally included a tacky postcard for old time’s sake. The last letter Ice had sent, Pete hadn’t thought much of how he’d said _Mav, I’m thirty next year, and I still don’t have what I want out of life. _He’d understood the feeling, but he hadn’t recognized it as meaning that Ice was about to finish his time in the navy and leave, without giving Pete a forwarding address of any kind. Pete didn’t even know if Ice had received any of the mail he’d sent since then. Probably not.

So Pete took his vacation in Vancouver, thinking that somehow, he’d run into Ice. He didn’t, of course, just spent a week wandering through the city, stopping in all the bars and coffee shops in the hopes of running into him and at the end of the week, he left without Ice.

It felt _wrong, _going to find Ice and _not finding him, _and suddenly, Pete was upending his whole life and following Ice’s lead: he quit, too.

\--

The deadline was a year, then two. After three, Pete wondered if he could ever set a deadline at all, a point where he would give up on finding Ice. By now, the best case scenario was that he’d find Ice had gotten married and had kids and was happy without him; worst, Pete would learn that Ice _wasn’t _out there somewhere. He just wanted to know that Ice had left to find whatever it was he wanted, and that Ice had accomplished that. After three, four and then five years, Pete could admit that what he really wanted was to find Ice and _stay _with him.

Pete fully expected that if he found Ice, it would be through the extensive work he was doing searching for him. Phone books, online records, property records; on the days he wasn’t flying a seaplane for tourists or giving lessons at the small, private flight school, he was going to every record-having place he could think of in the surrounding area, hunting for Ice’s name. He started south, and was working his way up; he’d ruled out Richmond, because it didn’t feel like a place Ice would be drawn to, and was leaving Burnaby for later, because he didn’t want to find Ice in the suburbs, where families lived.

He didn’t expect to find Ice by _finding him. _Pete had taken to running in Stanley Park, and now that it was winter, the cold was getting to him and he stopped his run early when it began to rain, ducking into the café for coffee.

And there was Ice. After five years, there was Ice. Sitting at a table with a laptop in front of him, the aviators hung on his shirt collar like a promise that he hadn’t forgotten everything he’d come from.

In five years, Pete still hadn’t thought of what to say.

“Ice?” he managed, and Ice jolted like it was a name he hadn’t heard in years. He looked the same, although there was a new openness on his face when he looked at Pete, like he’d forgotten how he used to be, closed-off and above.

“What’re you doing here?” Ice asked, and Pete took it as an invitation to sit in the empty chair beside him. “Are you on vacation?” Ice said, and Pete laughed.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. I’m on a break, whatever. What’re _you _doing here?” And Ice told him without really telling him – he’d left the navy, had gone to school for a while, was working in something to do with a general contractor, Pete wasn’t hearing anything that _answered _him. “But why _here?” _Pete finally asked, because it was the easiest of all his questions.

“I’ll show you,” Ice said, and he packed up his things, led Pete outside, where the rain had lessened into a mist. He brought Pete towards the water, but not to the green bridge that towered to their right. He stopped at the railing, the water stretching to the horizon before them. “Reminds me of flying,” Ice said, and Pete could see why. Even though they were on land, the water seemed to surround them, a vastness that other oceans somehow didn’t have. Maybe it was the way the cold air made it feel like he was already out there on the water with nothing else around; maybe it was the stillness that blended the distance into one endless reach.

“What were you missing?” Pete asked, but he didn’t want Ice to have to answer that, not yet, and he added, “I left to look for you.”

Ice was quiet for a long time. “I was looking for you,” he said, so soft, “at least, I figured that out eventually. I came here because I could get married here, and I didn’t realize that I wasn’t looking for just anyone.” He looked over, and Pete could see on his face everything he’d written in his letters, all the sweet, soft things Pete hadn’t seen when they’d first met. Somehow, Ice had become an entirely new person since then, shared through their letters; somehow, Pete recognized him.

“Well, if you were looking for me, and I was looking for you,” Pete said, turned from the endless ocean to look at Ice, to find Ice finally beside him, a new vastness before them, “here we are.”

“Here we are,” Ice echoed, like he felt the same way Pete did: like part of him wasn’t here, was back reading a letter and wanting to be in this impossible present.

“If you want a suggestion for where to go next,” Pete said, but Ice knew; he grabbed Pete and kissed him, hard and like he’d been waiting _years. _

“With you,” Ice said, and it was soft, but somehow Pete had heard him, from miles away and years later, and Pete had come to get him, to bring Ice where he wanted to be. Maybe that was what they did, they found each other. Over and over again, through postcards and coincidences and in the endless sky over the boundless ocean, they found each other.


End file.
